5 TIPS FOR KETO
www.ruled.me 5 TIPS TO STAY SUCCESSFUL ON A KETOGENIC DIET
TIP #1: Track what you eat. In this day and age, technology is at an all-time high and constantly improving our lives. An example of this is an easy way to count your daily calorie and macronutrient intakes. Calorie counting tools are a fantastic way to see just exactly what you are putting into your body on a daily basis. Counting your calories, carbs, fats, and proteins can be a huge hassle when you’re transitioning into a keto diet, but it should be done and can be quite easy to do. There are tons of benefits to knowing exactly how many calories are going into your body, but there’s even more from knowing where the calories come from. Using a simple tool, we can track our daily intake of calories, carbs, proteins, and fats – and most importantly see how many left we have in the day. Now, you want the secret sauce don’t you? MyFitnessPal easily and effectively does this for you right at the disposal of your fingertips. I’ve been using their website and mobile app for a long time now, and I have to say it’s the best I’ve come across by far. They have a built in database of almost every food, so it’s a carbless-cake walk to maintain a daily journal of your diet.
Why Track Your Carbs? You might be asking me, “What’s the point of using a calorie counter?” Well, there are numerous reasons to, including: Portion Control: As you increasingly read nutrition labels, you’ll realize that serving sizes are tiny. Manufacturers do that on purpose to get their nutrition counts low, and to get more people to buy products. This app can help you follow proper portion control, resulting in a proper and successful diet.
Hidden Carbs: Some labels show that their products have 0 carbs, but you’d be surprised at how many things actually have carbs in them. Remember, 1g of carbs can really add up over a day’s worth of eating! Splenda used to be one of my favorite things to use because it had no carbs in it, but it actually has quite a few carbs if you are using it a lot.
Delusional Beliefs: Oh come on, we all do it. You might measure out some cheese and not realize that it’s more than you think. Or scoop out some peanut butter on a spoon and realize it’s closer to 2 tablespoons rather than one. Make sure you stay on track and measure things out.
Configuring MyFitnessPal I’ll be using the mobile app for this, because I always have my phone with me. I don’t want to run over to my computer every time I eat just to put in my meal. For setting up all the macros for a keto diet, you will have to use the website.
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www.ruled.me 5 TIPS TO STAY SUCCESSFUL ON A KETOGENIC DIET
Configuring Your Goals Create an account at MyFitnessPal and login. Once you’re at the home screen, click Goals, and then click Change Goals at the bottom.
When done, click Custom: Manually set my own custom fitness goals. Then click Continue.
From here, you can change your carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake to: Carbs – 5% Protein – 15% Fats – 80% Change your daily calories allowance based off of the macros you calculated at the very beginning (using the guide I e-mailed out). Once finished, finalize this by clicking Change Goals.
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www.ruled.me 5 TIPS TO STAY SUCCESSFUL ON A KETOGENIC DIET We highly recommend that you add in your measurements for your neck, waist, hips, thigh, chest, and arms. Sometimes the scale doesn’t tell the whole truth and you are putting muscle on (only if you are exercising), so tracking your measurements can give a greater feeling of overall success. You also have to keep in mind that not everyone has perfect macros that meet up with the 80/15/5 rule. Some people will be 78/17/5 or something else. The goals you set in MyFitnessPal are there to give you a rough idea, but you should ALWAYS track your macros by the gram values rather than the percentage values.
Track Your Nutrition For a keto diet we have to calculate net carbs, so we will want to take that into consideration. Now, let’s start tracking fiber so we can get our actual carb counts for the day, our net carbs. Click Food in the top menu and then go to Settings.
Under your Nutrients Tracked section, you should list Carbohydrates, Fat, Protein, Fiber, and Sodium. I like to track my sodium intake also, because it can be helpful to your dehydration levels and overall energy levels. On keto, you will need more salt than the average person. This is because the kidneys will hold on to less salt and flush your system out more frequently than a normal diet. So, make sure you keep your salt content higher than normal so you don’t have any negative side effects (tiredness, dizziness, etc.)
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www.ruled.me 5 TIPS TO STAY SUCCESSFUL ON A KETOGENIC DIET
Your Food Diary You can enter your meals into the food diary and track your daily intake of your calories. I do this on my phone and can see an overall view of my daily intake of nutrients. You tap the MyFitnessPal Logo at the top left of your screen, and then tap Diary in the list that shows up.
Once you are at your diary, you can add new meals and snacks in there by tapping the plus [ + ] button on the top right of your screen. You can view charts of your daily intake of nutrients and see how you are doing. Keep in mind that the chart will be semi-inaccurate because it does not calculate net carbs!
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www.ruled.me 5 TIPS TO STAY SUCCESSFUL ON A KETOGENIC DIET
TIP #2: Plan your meals ahead. With the information found it Tip #1, we will utilize what you’ve learned and start planning for a successful diet ahead of us. Each day, you MUST spend at least 15 minutes planning your day ahead. Even if it’s just a rough guideline of what you’re planning to eat, that’s good enough. Think about what’ll be happening the next day – will you be going out to eat, will you be able to make and bring all your meals, will you be time constricted in any way? Take all of this into account and then enter what you think your eating habits will look like. If you have leftovers from the night before, utilize them! Make this the easiest transition you can with the least amount of work possible. Remember, this is something you have to stick with to succeed with!
By tracking your meals in advance, even if it is a rough guideline, you’ll be able to see if there’s any mistakes you made. For example in the diary entry here, we can see that the protein is much too high. So now that we know that there is a mistake, we can also fix that in advanced. Seek out where all the protein is coming from, and swap it out with something that’ll get rid of those proteins but still keep the fat content. Remember that excess protein will get converted to glucose during the process called gluconeogenesis – and this is a bad thing! Make sure you’re correcting your mistakes before they happen, rather than trying to make up for the mistakes that already did happen.
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www.ruled.me 5 TIPS TO STAY SUCCESSFUL ON A KETOGENIC DIET
TIP #3: Have a proper sleep schedule. Many studies show that there is a connection between sleeping and appetite. To be more precise, there is a connection between sleep and a balance of leptin and ghrelin in the body. Ghrelin is a hormone that's produced in the stomach and is released when we are hungry. It increases our appetite and the need to eat. Leptin, on the other hand, is produced in fat cells and is released to tell our brain that we're full. This, conversely, decreases appetite and increases out satiation (fullness). In one study that was done on 12 men, the doctors allows 2 days of sleep deprivation followed by 2 days of as much sleep as the patients wanted. They monitored hormone levels, appetite, and activity level. In the days when sleep deprivation was encountered, leptin levels went down and ghrelin levels went up. Because of this, their appetite also went up and the desire for higher calorie foods shot up about 45%. In another study conducted by Stanford, scientists recorded the amount of hours 1,000 volunteers reported and tested their ghrelin, leptin, and body fat percentage levels. They found that in people that slept less than 8 hours a night, their hormones were a little bit out of whack. In fact, the people that slept less than 8 hours a night has increased levels of ghrelin (which makes you hungry), decreased levels of leptin (which gives the fullness effect), and higher body fat percentages than the people that got a good night’s rest. Not only does sleep play a part in regulating our leptin and ghrelin levels, it also plays a role in the production of human growth hormone. HGH helps preserve muscle and keeps our metabolism strong with a lack of it, we see a reduction in our BMR (which results in less calories burnt by the body on a daily basis). There's also been some studies that show a lowering in HGH if we eat 3 hours prior to going to sleep, so it is quite good practice to end your dinner-time at least 4 hours before you are planning to go to bed. If you're the type of person that can't fall asleep easily or stay asleep, I suggest trying some of the following things:
Avoid food before bedtime. Follow a regular sleep schedule. Reduce the amount of caffeine in your diet. Darken your bedroom as much as possible. Try natural supplements. This includes valerian root, melatonin, and kava.
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www.ruled.me 5 TIPS TO STAY SUCCESSFUL ON A KETOGENIC DIET
TIP #4: Find people that can support you. Finding a support group or someone to support you to keep you on track is a very important thing when it comes to shifting your diet completely. It's no secret that fats are still the pariah of the health world, and what you eat will most likely be shunned by the people around you. Being able to vent about this and talk to like-minded people around you will not only help bring stress levels down, but allow you to express your feelings and frustrations with such a big transition. In fact, many people report higher percentages of success when they have someone else or a group of people to talk to about the ins and outs of what they're doing. Being able to talk about frustrations, talk about understanding the new world of fats, and gaining new ideas from people will all lead to a more successful journey. Luckily, we have a fantastic community of people that support, eat, and have lived through the weightloss of a ketogenic diet. People that know exactly what you're going through, people that know exactly what your goals are, and people that will try to help you out in any way possible. Plus, I'm over there so I'm always willing to help answer questions and give advice on what to do for the next step. Not only can you talk to people, you can become friends with people too. Through many other forums, I have gained life-long friends that I still talk to after 10 years. You can find accountability partners, you can post questions, but best of all – you can post advice and get tips on how to make this transition to a healthier and skinnier you!
Join the Ketogenic Living Forum on Ruled.me
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www.ruled.me 5 TIPS TO STAY SUCCESSFUL ON A KETOGENIC DIET
TIP #5: Reward Yourself.
Now, I know what you're thinking - let's go out and have a great meal to celebrate the weight loss. No! Why put all the hard work you've put into this so far in jeopardy? Don't do that, but do treat yourself to something nice that isn't diet related. This is the important part – something that isn’t diet related. Set a goal for yourself. Make sure that it's reasonable and attainable, and give yourself little rewards as you hit those goals. Set milestones for yourself where you can do something bigger, that you might not normally do so that you can celebrate becoming healthier! Have you had your eye on a new pair of shoes, a new pair of jeans, or just need to blow off some steam and get out of the house? Do it! Treat yourself by doing something for yourself. Not only does this give positive reinforcement for sticking to a plan, but it also gives you something to look forward to when you’re on this. If you’re faced with a decision on having pizza for lunch, or eating what you have on hand – it makes it just that little bit easier to make the decision to stay healthy. For some, this is only about weight loss, but for most this is going to be a long-term diet that they’re in for the true health benefits of keto. As you get better with self-control, the easier it will become in the longterm – and as time goes on, it will just become second nature to stay low carb all the time. As always, I wish you the best with your journey to health and success – you know where you can find me!
Craig Clarke Page 8
